OYP Episode 11: Quinnton Harris

Quinnton, Group Creative Director at Publicis Sapient, talks about the value of confidence and bringing your full authentic self to work.

Interview

Ashley Snow - Welcome to the Own Your Potential Podcast, where you'll hear stories from leaders across the globe about how they've taken control of their career growth and lessons on how you can too. I'm Ashley snow, and this is episode 11 with Quinnton Harris, show up and be yourself. Quinnton, can you start by telling us a little bit about your career background.

Quinnton Harris - Right now I'm working for John Maeda at Publicis Sapient doing experience design, I came in as a group creative director. So I'm doubling as someone who works on global initiatives within experience, but then also as a creative director on client work. For the most part, I've been at PS since January, working around to different types of clients. Right now I'm in the transportation and mobility industry group. And before I got to PS, I actually took a year long sabbatical, I worked two startups back to back. The first startup that I worked at was called Walker and Company, which was a consumer products company. And I worked as a lead designer for both their web properties, but then also did a little bit of their brand and internal product design, packaging design type of work. And that company was actually acquired by Procter and Gamble. The second company was a media startup called Blabbity, that owned several different media properties that specifically created content and experiential programs for black millennials. It was started by a woman named Morgan Bond and I came in as their first creative director to build out their creative team to work internally on projects. Built the brands up that we had, we had about five brand different brands that cater to different subcultures and sub audiences, as well as work on internal advertising, and marketing initiatives with our client partners. So it was pretty demanding four years of my life working in these tech startups, and I just was burnt out and I completely needed to take a break and get a perspective on life. And before going into the full out tech space, I started my career at a company called Digitas within Publicis Groupe. And that was right out of school. I started as a junior art director within digital advertising. And I worked on brands like Bank of America, Aflac, American Express, Dunkin Donuts, kind of the big 100 companies coming from an engineering background, I had a degree in mechanical engineering and in two minors in architecture and visual arts. It was the first time in my life where I felt like I was connecting the dots on a pathway that I wanted to follow. Just because in school, I had these ideas for what I believe that I wanted to do, but I just couldn't connect the dots. I was studying engineering, I loved the design process didn't really understand that I liked design agnostic of hardware, or you know, some of the more engineering focused topics, I kind of struggled a bit in school just to find my way. And as I started to take more architecture classes and more visual arts classes, that's where I started to really piece together some ideas on what I want to do.

Ashley Snow - Tell us about your brand, your identity in the workplace, and how have you gone about building your brand.

Quinnton Harris - I remember, this is my senior year in school. And I was just coming to grips with the idea that I was not going to be an engineer, post grad, I had successfully completed a internship at Digitas. And so I got a taste of the advertising space. And I said, I think I'm gonna do this from now on, I remember needing to create a portfolio so that I could start applying to different firms. And I remember being just really curious about what my digital footprint was at the time. So this is 2010. So I don't think a lot of people were thinking so much about their social or digital presence. But for me, I thought it was really important that when someone types in my name to Google, I would come up and my work would come up in my pictures of myself will come up just so that folks could find me and have access to me. And I'll never forget when I searched my name in the spelling of my name, because it's a little bit different in the way it's spelled. The first couple of images that came up were actually mug shots of men, particularly of black men, and they were mug shots of folks who had just been incarcerated or have been incarcerated for a while, and it jarred me a bit because my name was kind of associated with That type of imagery, but maybe this was the experience, not just for me, but for a lot of other men of color that had maybe similar names or black sounding names. From that day I remember saying to myself, I'm going to saturate the internet with my world. And I've made that commitment to myself. And I think that my brand has been show and demonstrate what it means to be a brilliant black man who is emotive, who is vulnerable, who is authentic, and to really kind of create work to the best of his ability and really publish that work online so that it can combat some of that earlier stigma that I experienced.

Ashley Snow - Has being an authentic self advocate always come easily to you, or is it a skill that you've had to grow over time?

Quinnton Harris - It's something that I've had to build over time, I always thought that I was doing something wrong. I felt like I had such a wide variety of interests and things that I wanted to pursue. But oftentimes, when you're applying to jobs, you have to be really refined, you have to be specific. And for me, it was really hard for me to do that. Because I was so many things, I had so many interests, while I felt fairly rebellious. And the way that I was trying to communicate my story and tell my story often times didn't feel comfortable in spaces like my like my professional space to tell that story or to bring myself my full self to the room just because as a tall black man, showing up into a space, I was constantly battling idea that people should be afraid of me. Oftentimes, I felt myself shrink, or I would make myself shrink. In order to feel safe or to feel comfortable in a space, I was taught that my very presence could be intimidating to others, and to be threatening, whether it be physically or emotionally or mentally. It's been a journey for me to really kind of remind myself that it is okay for me to be myself and to be open and to be vulnerable in spaces where I typically can be afraid.

Ashley Snow - If you could go back in time and talk to the younger version of yourself, who had a hard time bringing his full authentic self to the workplace. What would you tell him?

Quinnton Harris - I would tell a younger version of Q that hey, man, you overthinking it, it's okay does not consider everybody's opinion of you. Everybody's critique of you. It's okay for you to just really show up and be yourself and to learn how to refine yourself and your presence to ultimately achieve what you want in life, not with other people's wants for you to achieve or what are the people's expectation is because yes, you will have to compromise in certain moments, not necessarily your identity, but maybe the way in which you show up in order to achieve the goal that you want. But the compromise should always come at a place where you're evaluating the cost of it and it's not costing you something that is valuable to you, whether it's your time whether it's your energy, whether it's your understanding of your own personal identity.